Nature vs. Nurture: Sex Change Romances

In class we explored sex change romances, a reoccurring topic in medieval literature, notably the tale of Silence. The neomedieval books we studied also bore traits of gender confusion and appropriation, such as the path of Arya Stark in AGOT. I looked up some information about sex change romances and came across the article "How to be a Man, Though Female: Changing Sex in Medieval Romance" by Angela Jane Weisl. [Access it at http://ir.uiowa.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1813&context=mff.]

Weisl explores gender confusion and transformation in medieval literature, which she finds to be a "surprisingly popular topic." She states that the literature "offers a full range of gender potential, suggesting that the gendered body is permeable and malleable" and that "in more modern parlance, the romance implies that biology is far from being destiny." In class we discussed how Arya's journey through the A Song of Ice and Fire novel series seems to portray a more realistic struggle of a woman posing as a male as she struggles to embody and master masculine, rather than feminine, traits. In contrast, Silence seemed to portray a far more idealized depiction of a woman thriving as a man, for not only was her gender never questioned, but she was a wondrously successful knight [before her gender was exposed, at least].

A quote in Weisl's text helped me to understand why it was far easier for Silence to pose as a man than it was for Aria. Weisl states: "because knighthood is so explicitly defined in terms of gender, the women who pass as men in these stories are able to do so because of their rigid understanding of what nature means." This quote sheds some light on the nature vs. nurture debate that Silence examined. Since Silence was raised from a young age to live as a boy—she learned all the social cues of a man and was raised with the gendering of a male—it made it much easier for her to assimilate as one. She was exclusively and explicitly taught to think and act like a man, which gave her a solid grasp of how to be one. On the other hand, Aria clearly had an innate desire to jettison her traditional female upbringing, but since she was not allowed to learn the social customs and training of a boy, she struggled more when forced to live like one. Therefore, nurture clearly played a role in both females’ abilities to pose as men.

However, I find that both texts undermine the importance of nature. A debate over the "cultural and biological determinations of gender" can be read at http://articles.latimes.com/2004/may/13/local/me-reimer13, which delves into the sad story of David Reimer. After a botched circumcision rendered the male infant genitally deformed, his parents chose to raise him as a girl. Reimer lived for 14 years as a girl, but he “rebelled at [his] imposed identity from the start,” always knowing that something was wrong. After discovering what had happened, Reimer chose to live as a male, but the psychological scars were too devastating for Reimer to overcome. He eventually took his life at age 38. Therefore this very real case argues against some of the questions raised in the medieval sex change romances and neomedieval tales that we examined. Though gender is in part a product of social conditioning, I think that nature also plays a predominant role in shaping an individual, which Silence eventually comes to learn at the end of her tale, as she so seamlessly is able to embrace her biological female nature once women are allowed to inherit once more.

Seeds in Game of Thrones

     It is very apparent that women have always been inferior in the eyes of men, even in our current present day. Tracing back to Medieval times, women's bodies were considered deformed, polluted, and especially, disgusting. In an article titled, Woman Defamed and Woman Defended, Alcuin Blamires discusses two specific theories. These theories are called the one and two seed theory. Blamires details the one seed theory, stated by Aristotle, as men giving the vast majority of uniqueness to their children. Mothers are known as the vessels for children, while fathers contribute the children's overall being. As opposed to the one seed theory, the two seed theory, described by Galen, states that a child receives two seeds, but one is stronger than the other. Both theories degrade women to the bottom of the gender totem pole, but how do these theories pertain to certain instances like incest, heirs, and power, which all connect to a simple character from the Game of Thrones, Cersei Lannister.

Cersei is the widowed wife of Robert Baratheon, the Queen regent of the Seven Kingdoms, mother of Joffrey, Myrcella, and Tommen, and shares a incestuous relationship with her twin Jaime Lannister. Cersei’s role as Queen Regent to guide her sons as they take the throne and be a mother queen as the new queen steps in line. Cersei demands power in the Seven kingdoms because she has suffered throughout her life and has pushed her way to get to the top and does everything she can to remain there. Cersei considers herself Tywin’s best son due to the fact that she is the only child who takes her father’s advice and does what she’s told. Although Cersei is the only female child of Tywin, she stands as the most masculine in the sense that she uses her knowledge and gender role to get her to the throne. Another spin to Cersei’s character is that she not only has an incestuous relationship with her twin brother Jaime, Cersei’s children are also fathered by Jaime.

Pertaining this back to the seed theories, how does Cersei relate to both or one of the theories and how can that reflect on women from Medieval times? Looking at the one seed theory, our present day Biology tells us that men determine the sex of children. Comparing this to the one seed theory, since men give the vast majority of uniqueness to their children, that would mean that when females are born, the mother’s seed was stronger than the father’s. This can relate back to Cersei being Tywin’s best son because her seed was able to beat out Jaime’s seed. But if you look at the two seed theory, Myrcella would be considered a deformed, mutilated man and Cersei’s seed was stronger in the sense that it deformed one of her children. So which theory would Cersei follow? Cersei shared a womb with her twin brother, so why would her blood be different than Jaime’s? Just because her body is different to her brother’s does not mean she did not contribute the same characteristics to her children. Cersei is a great example to test the contradictions within these theories because it allows the readers to look at the one sided views on women and how those views can’t follow that men create the children and women are just the vessel.   

"Men have scars, women mysteries": Blood magic in ASOIAF as a reproduction of Aristotle's blood hierarchy

In the fourth century BCE, Aristotle wrote about blood hierarchies. He believed that all bodily fluids were the same, just more or less purified versions of blood. He named semen as the top of this hierarchy, calling it "the final form of nourishment," the pinnacle of purification. Of course, he placed menstrual blood at the bottom of the hierarchy:

Now the weaker creature [woman] too must of necessity produce a residue greater in amount and less thoroughly concocted, and this, if such is its character, be of necessity a volume of bloodlike fluid... the secretion in females which answers to semen is the menstrual fluid.

This idea that men's bodily secretions were somehow cleaner and more refined than women's (shockingly) prevailed in Europe throughout the Middle Ages. This resulted in a lot of, let's just say, interesting tall tales—my personal favorite being the myth that women with irregular or no periods could shoot acidic menstrual blood out of their eyes like lasers.

I dunno, watching election news kinda makes me think that myth didn't go away.

Interestingly, in George Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series, women's menstrual blood isn't construed as acidic or bile-like, or really even (all that) disgusting. It's another form of blood, and the only time men concern themselves with female blood at all seems to be when they're concerned with whether a girl is old enough to marry, and as proof of her virginity on her wedding night.

But George doesn't get off the hook that easily. See, in his world, women's blood may not create deep trenches in the earth or poison babies, but it is the only blood explicitly used in magic and prophecy. And, in a series comprised of 5 books and roughly 1,770,000 words (so far), that connection isn't to be ignored.

Blood magic starts off in the first book of the series, A Game of Thrones, when the maegi Mirri Maaz Duur uses both horse's blood to force a miscarriage onto Daenerys—a bloody affair in and of itself—to keep Khal Drogo alive, in a vegetative state. The magic Dany had begged the witch to do involved her own blood and her child's to do, and it gave her only a husk of her husband. 

The next interaction with blood magic isn't much better: A Feast for Crows opens with a young Cersei going to Maggy the Frog (also a maegi—white people just can't pronounce foreign words) for her fortune. The witch requires Cersei's blood to tell her, and the future she reads is dark, haunting Cersei to the present day.

Even in sheer prophecy, not even blood magic, women's blood is key. In the third book, A Storm of Swords, Patchface (the court fool of Stannis Baratheon) sings a lunatic song that later turns out to prophesy the Red Wedding, one of the biggest turning points of the series' main military conflict, the War of the Five Kings. He sings:

Fool's blood
King's blood
Blood on the maiden's thigh
But chains for the guests
And chains for the bridegroom
Aye, aye, aye 

Thus, the Red Wedding, at which the war loses its best contender at his uncle's wedding, it is still of some fundamental importance to mention that a woman, and a maiden nonetheless, will bleed. Even in the magic of prophecy, far removed from blood magic, blood is vital, and the blood of women is essential.

So George doesn't write about women's blood being disgusting, or lesser, in any such terms, but he instead writes another iteration of the same perspective: women's blood is the only blood imbued with magic, and women's blood should be feared for it. There is as much a blood hierarchy in ASOIAF as there is in medieval literature and thought—when men are wounded in battle, it's honorable, but when women bleed, it's often sorcery.

In A Clash of Kings, Cersei Lannister tells Sansa Stark, "A woman's life is nine parts mess to one part magic, you'll learn that soon enough... and the parts that look like magic turn out to be the messiest of all." Little does Sansa—or most readers—know just how right she is.

Out for Blood: Reactions to Women Bleeding

In the show and books, Game of Thrones treats blood as a symbol of a women’s ability to have children, and therefore ability to be married. In the show, Sansa Stark is horrified to wake up to find that she has started her period. She wakes from a nightmare where she is being harassed to find blood all over her sheets. In this scene the focus is on her blood that has stained her sheets instead of the blood on her. She rushes to get a knife to cut out the stain and Shae walks in and immediately starts helping her hide the blood, which they are eventually unsuccessful in doing. Sansa’s blood was the focus of this scene. After, Sansa confesses to Cersei that she did not expect it so messy and Cersei tells her that childbirth is worse. The obsession with Sansa’s “flowering” is connected to her ability now to have children, specifically Joffery’s children, so they can now marry. In this example, a medieval woman bleeds to show her ability to have children. She is scared of her own blood while everyone else was anticipating it. As Sansa is now scared of the king, the thought of having his children is something is desperately avoiding. The same acceptance and usefulness of women’s blood is seen with Dany as she prepares to marry Khal Drogo. She is described as being ready for marriage because “she has had her blood” (34). Again women’s blood is connected to their ability to have children and therefore, in this scenario, their individual worth.

Another example of blood from the show is in the scene between Ygritte and Jon Snow in which Ygritte assures Jon that “girls see more blood than boys.” Here is another reverse to women’s menstruation and childbirth but this time it is in a superior tone. Ygritte portrays women’s almost indifference to blood as a strength they have over men.

From the book A Feast for Crows, Cersei does not talk of blood in menstruation; instead it is something that is showing her weakness. Curse has a dream that she is sitting on the Iron Throne but it is almost attacking her as the sharp edges cut into her skin. The description of the dream is vivid: “blood ran red down her legs, as still teeth gnawed at her buttocks…The more she struggled the more the throne engulfed her, tearing chunks of flesh from her breasts and belly, slicing at her arms and legs until they were slick and red, glistening” (Martin 65-66). Here blood seems to be Cersei’s punishment for wanting to hold a man’s position and gain power. Cersei imitating a man has caused her to bleed and her blood is not praised for what it brings or a sign of strength but rather a sign of her weakness and shortcoming.

For these female characters, the presence of blood takes on several different meanings and can either be an unwelcome sentence or a symbol of their power.

“There are fights no sword can win”: Catelyn and Sansa Stark as (Better) Representations of Medieval Noblewomen

If there’s anything A Song of Ice and Fire (and Game of Thrones) have, it’s a lot of characters. Enough to justify 25+ page appendices at the end of each book, and infographics across the internet for show-viewers. 

I wonder if GRRM has a wall of his house devoted to keeping track of this stuff.

Thus, both series include a range of female characters (though the narrative treatment of the women arguably doesn’t vary that much), fitting many roles familiar to us as so-called ‘strong female characters’ (I’m setting the critiques of that idea and those portrayals aside for the sake of this post).

Among the women in the series are many fan favorites and favorites-to-hate, like Daenerys Targaryen, Cersei Lannister, Brienne of Tarth, and Arya Stark. Daenerys and Cersei mirror one another in their use of marriage and childbearing to claim power in their own right—Daenerys as khaleesi of what will become her own (small) khalasar, and Cersei becoming Queen Regent over Joffrey, followed by Tommen. Brienne and Arya take the opposing route: rather than using their femininity to work around men, they forego it instead, dressing masculinely and learning skills only taught to men (fighting, swordplay, survival skills, etc.)

Game of Thrones, more like Game of "Who's that again?"

These are all larger-than-life women (and girls) who openly defy their societies in ways we recognize and love today, because the ways they claim agency are familiar tropes to modern audiences. They remind us of the Katniss Everdeens, Hermione Graingers, and Blue Sergeants of the modern book-to-movie machine. Because of the Westerosi and Dothraki societies they inhabit, they may not hold power in the way a man could, but they do hold agency over themselves in ways many of their fellow female characters cannot.

But, despite these characters’ popularity and their compelling narratives, the texts we’ve read so far—Chaucer’s The Man of Law’s Tale and the Encomium Emmae Reginae—don’t lead me to believe that these larger-than-life, openly defiant, openly powerful women were common in the actual medieval era. Instead, I think the characters audiences tend to overlook are the more realistic representations of female power in a medieval patriarchal structure. Particularly Catelyn and Sansa Stark.

Hard to believe there was a time when things didn't suck for the Starks.

In a 2012 interview, George R. R. Martin was asked why he kept coming back to ASOIAF. His response was—shockingly—long-winded, but within it, he discussed Sansa, saying,

“So many of the people dislike her because they are just like her—they cannot understand characters who do not fit into predetermined roles. Women in fantasy are allowed to be strong in only a few ways—evil seductress, tomboy lady knight, etc.—and it frustrates so many readers that Sansa develops her strength not by rejecting her courtesy or her traditional femininity, but my making those things into armor… Once Sansa’s [personal narrative] has been torn down, has been eradicated completely, her only narrative, if you can call it that, is a will to survive. By the end of A Feast for Crows, she’s seeing her world more clearly than almost anyone else, even if she’s basically powerless to do anything about it.”

Now, I wouldn’t say that she’s powerless, as both Emma and Custance were not completely powerless. I argue instead that their defiance can only work within the power structures in which they live. For example, Emma’s contract with Cnut, giving their songs inheritance of his English throne before his elder sons is similar to Catelyn’s working as negotiator for Robb (in his capacity as King of the North) to Renly Baratheon and the Freys. Custance and Sansa also follow similar paths, namely, being sent to marry men without regard to their own will. And they each go through with it as part of their duty, as made evident when Custance (sorrowfully) prepares herself to leave Rome (lines 264-271), and when Sansa is forced into marrying Tyrion. They then both manage to defy the systems in their own ways, without wild disobedience, but rather spirituality and courtesy—Custance remains a Christian, and Sansa refuses to kneel for Tyrion Lannister at their wedding.

Basically, in these kinds of distinctly patriarchal systems, women are bargaining chips, and from a woman’s position in their society, even a royal position, little could be done to change it. And while I, like many others, enjoy the narratives of women who openly defy that positioning, characters like Cersei and Brienne remind me of a quote from American Gangster: “the loudest one in the room is the weakest one in the room.” Because, by claiming their own power through defiance, they make one major mistake: they make noise. And in a world where women are kept quiet, making noise makes them fast targets. On the other hand, those who defy quietly, cleverly, and with courtesy—characters like Emma and Sansa—retain more freedom than their louder counterparts. 

Until they become vengeance-seeking Zombies, anyway.

Sibling Rivalry: Power Play in "A Game of Thrones"

In George R.R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones, the progression of the relationship between Daenerys Targaryen and her brother Viserys shows Darnerys development as a woman of power. In the beginning, Daenerys is subjected to Viserys power over her, as she has no choice but to endure his cruelties in fear of “waking the dragon” (29). He thinks of her as his property that he can sell to Khal Drogo for his own personal gain in getting his crown back. When she marries Khal Drogo, she is no longer, in this sense, her brother’s property. While she clearly does not have freedom in the way she belongs to Khal Drogo, she becomes more in control. This agency begins when she takes away her bother’s horse so he has to walk back to the khalasar, which “among the Dothraki” is “the lowest of the low” a man can be to have his horse taken away (231). Viserys threatened her for giving him a simple command but he cannot fathom the idea of her being more powerful than him. This is seen before at Daenerys and Khal Drogo’s wedding when Viserys is made to sit in a place below the Khaleesi causing “his mood” to grow “blacker by the hour at each insult to his person” (101). In her marriage and new position though, Daenerys has the power to not submit to her brother’s will. She, backed by the Dothraki, has the ability to control her brother. Ironically, it was Viserys’s own actions that caused him to loose his power over his sister. He used his sister as a means to get back power without taking into account her wishes and in doing so he lost his control over his sister and is still no closer to his crown, giving him even less power than he had before. While she does not have power over her husband, she is no longer under the power of her brother. The Dothraki people honor her and in this way she holds Viserys fate in her hands.

Viserys and Daenerys Targaryen

Daenerys new sense of self-empowerment is seen, after she stands up to her brother, in her sexual affairs with Khal Drogo. She leads him outside and does not pay attention to the rest of the Dothraki watching them, as “it was nothing to her” being justified in her position: “was she not the khaleesi?” (236). Her sex life was still not under her control but she was starting to use her situation to her advantage.

Khal Drogo and Daenerys

The moment that Daenerys stands up to her brother is a turning point in her evolution of becoming more in control of her own actions and decisions.